Can you douse that job burnout?

A: It’s the end of the year, and lots of us are tired, unfocused and ready to take a nice break with our families —or in some cases, away from our families.

We may be feeling garden-variety stress. Or more ominously, we may be burned out.

Although most of us tend to use those phrases interchangeably, researchers say stress is to burnout as feeling blue is to clinical depression — a much more serious and long-term problem that doesn’t get the attention it should.

Burnout is not just when you need a vacation to recharge. It’s when you feel overwhelming exhaustion, frustration, cynicism and a sense of ineffectiveness and failure. Initially it referred to those in human services — health care, social work, therapy and police work — but has since expanded to all sorts of workers, said Christina Maslach, professor emerita of psychology at University of California, Berkeley.

Maslach is a pioneer in the study of burnout; in the early 1980s she and her colleagues developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which has become a crucial method for surveying professional burnout. The inventory contains 22 elements in these areas:
• Emotional exhaustion: Emotionally overextended, drained and used up without any source of replenishment. It’s the chronic feeling that you just can’t face another day.
• Cynicism or de-personalization: Loss of idealism. Particularly in the health professions, it can manifest itself as having a negative, callous or excessively detached response to other people.
• Reduced personal efficacy: Decline in feelings of competence and productivity at work.

Not enough research has been done in the United States to determine whether burnout is more widespread now than it was 30 years ago, but “people talk about it a lot more,” Maslach said.

Michael Leiter, a professor of occupational health at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, has studied the issue in hospitals. He said burnout was growing among nurses, and younger nurses were experiencing it more than older nurses.

He attributed that to the push to work harder with fewer resources, less pay and greater job insecurity. Also, as technology allows the lines between work and home to blur, many feel on-call all the time, with no opportunity for respite.

While most people think job burnout is just a matter of working too hard, that’s not necessarily true. Maslach and Leiter list six areas that can result in burnout: work overload; lack of control over the work; insufficient rewards; workplace community problems, such as incivility and a lack of support; a lack of fairness, such as inequality of pay, promotions or workload; and a conflict between one’s personal values and the requirements of a job.

While people need to figure out what they can do on an individual level, change will be limited without a shift in organizational thinking, Maslach said — a challenging proposition at best.

“Too often these things are seen as personal issues rather than professional,” Leiter said.

Individuals can also come up with strategies that are helpful, he added: getting enough sleep, exercising and eating well, and “pacing yourself very carefully and staying very focused on what you want to accomplish over the long run.”

But, he noted, “there’s the issue of justice — when a whole part of society that doesn’t seem to work very hard gets a lot of rewards and another gets squeezed harder and harder. That won’t be addressed in a mindfulness session.”

Last modified: December 17, 2013
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